Ten or 15 years ago, Friedrich Merz would have seemed a wildly unlikely candidate for the role of savior to Europe’s liberal democracy. Spoiler alert: He still does.
But the internal decay of European politics has reached a critical stage, whose stakes were made abundantly clear by the ludicrous spectacle of Donald Trump and JD Vance berating Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office for insufficiently groveling before the Orange Throne. This was not the historical moment Merz expected, and it definitely isn’t the one he wanted. But for better or worse, he looks to be Europe’s last man standing.
If we flash back to the bygone days of the late 2000s, Merz’s future looked to be in the past: He was Angela Merkel's defeated right-wing rival in the Christian Democratic Union, the mainstream conservative party that has dominated German electoral politics since the fall of the Nazi regime, first in the former West Germany and then, less convincingly, in post-1990 reunified Germany. Merz left politics and racked up millions in the private sector as a corporate lawyer, including a five-year stint as board chairman at BlackRock Germany, a major branch of the world’s largest asset management firm.
He returned to the CDU in 2018 as the anti-Merkel, vowing to spice up the party’s usual agenda of pro-business fiscal “austerity” and free trade with staunchly pro-American foreign policy and a dash of hard-right anti-immigration policy. Even amid the continent-wide political chaos caused by the Syrian migrant crisis and the rise of fascist-flavored parties in one country after another, it still took three tries for Merz to get himself elected party leader after Merkel’s retirement.
After “winning” Germany’s recent federal elections, in what may be remembered as a textbook example of Pyrrhic victory — the CDU finished first with 28.5 percent of the vote, slightly better than its worst-ever result in 2021 — Merz will now be forced to preside over an awkward coalition of center-right and center-left parties, whose primary purpose (at least on the home front) will be to fend off further advances by the not-quite neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party, or AfD. If you want to find a silver lining to the German elections — and frankly, that isn't easy — it would be this: While the AfD finished second with 20.8 percent of the vote, basically doubling its 2021 total, there’s no evidence that Elon Musk’s enthusiastic endorsement (or Vance’s slightly less overt endorsement) did them any good.
On the international front, as last Friday’s contretemps in the White House threw into sharp relief, Merz will become the leader of the largest and most important member of the European Union at precisely the moment when it must “achieve independence from the U.S.,” to use his own words from a post-election press conference. On one hand, Merz is something of a black box, an untested leader who has never held a position in government and whose entire career seems mismatched to this perilous fork in history’s road. On the other, he appears to grasp the magnitude of the current crisis, and has so far given no indication that he will seek accommodation with either Germany’s far right or their MAGA pals in Washington.
Merz has described the attempts by Musk and various other Yank interlopers to meddle in Germany’s elections as “no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow,” and suggested that under Trump the U.S. appeared “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.” This marks a startling reversal for the man described by German journalist Jörg Lau as the most pro-American politician in Germany and “a lifelong believer in the transatlantic security alliance” (i.e., in NATO, which Trump seems determined to demolish). That may also reflect a sense of injured pride and betrayal: Clear back to Konrad Adenauer in the 1950s, the CDU has always presented itself as a staunch American ally, largely aligned with what we’d now have to call the vanished orthodoxy of the pre-Trump Republican Party.
At the same time, Merz has described the startling surge of the AfD as “the last warning to the political parties of the democratic center” to reach consensus on immigration policy, economic reforms, a shared European defense strategy and numerous other thorny issues. Germany found itself under “massive pressure from two sides,” he said — presumably meaning the U.S. and Russia — along with significant internal divisions: The AfD dominated in the economically struggling states of former East Germany, while Merz’s party won in the more prosperous west. (The rapidly fading Social Democrats won in Berlin, and almost nowhere else.) In historical terms, Merz concluded, it was “five minutes to midnight for Europe.”
So, damn! Will this acrid-tongued, 69-year-old multimillionaire, a child of the rural Catholic haute bourgeoisie — he was raised in the house his mother’s family built in 1752 — turn out, against all odds, to be the statesman the world needs now, ideology and partisan affiliation aside? Is he a latter-day Churchill standing astride the tides of history, ready to push back Vladimir Putin on one side and Trump on the other?
Of course the real answer is that no one can see the future and it’s likely to surprise us: Maybe! It’s just about conceivable that Merz, now liberated from his previous pro-American views and in a forced marriage with his domestic political opponents, will reveal that kind of strength. But honestly, that scenario requires a world-historical level of wishful thinking.
For one thing, as Lau observes in the Guardian essay quoted above, Merz was effectively for Donald Trump before he was against him. He ran as an overtly MAGA-curious candidate during his failed campaign for CDU leadership in 2018, and only weeks ago pushed a harsh non-binding resolution on migrant policy through the Bundestag with the AfD’s support. That Trump-style political maneuver, meant to shame outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz by capitalizing on a series of violent attacks committed by immigrants, did not technically violate the “firewall” that prohibits Germany’s mainstream parties from forming coalitions with the far right. But as Lau suggests, it may have led normie voters to wonder whether Merz could be trusted.
Merz isn't the only mainstream European conservative to turn bearish on America; it's starting to look like a trend. Former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin is an old hand, having made world headlines back in 2003 by opposing the U.S. war in Iraq in an eloquent U.N. address. He's now considering a 2027 presidential campaign, in hopes of fending off rising far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. In a recent interview with the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, de Villepin outdid Merz, proclaiming that "America can no longer be considered an ally of Europe" and that the world now finds itself divided between "three illiberal superpowers: Russia, China and the U.S."
Both Merz and de Villepin see the opportunity, in the latter's words, for "a European awakening of democracy." That's an inspiring phrase, but one that avoids the larger historical question: Can the existing European order that elite political leaders like them are so eager to defend actually be saved, in anything like its current form? You don’t have to be a Trumper or an ultra-leftist to observe that the so-called Western alliance has been decaying for some time; one of Putin’s guiding principles, which has yet to be falsified, is that if he jabs it in the right spot it will collapse altogether. Rethinking the relationship between Europe, America and the rest of the world shouldn't be left to JD Vance and his buddies in the nationalist new right.
It’s difficult to imagine that Merz — by all accounts a person of highly conventional ideas, atop a fragile coalition with a narrow political mandate — is ready to seize that portfolio. Even a cursory reading of German history suggests darker parallels: Merz looks and sounds an awful lot like the pro-business upper-crust German conservatives of the early 1930s, who assumed they could dominate the radical upstart with the dopey mustache and his dimwit followers. Those guys were astride the tides of history too, but not in a good way.
Of course the past does not predict the future; it shapes it. That cautionary tale still has considerable resonance for Germans of Merz’s generation, even if many people in that country and elsewhere around the world have grown tired of hearing it. Those who fail to learn from history, as Salon contributor Mike Lofgren said to me recently, are doomed to repeat famous quotations. Whatever Friedrich Merz does with his improbable starring role on the world stage, let’s hope his lessons are in order.
